The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly
Donovan Hohn, the acting editor of Lapham's Quarterly, interviews historians, writers, and journalists about books that bring voices from the past up to the microphone of the present. New episodes are released weekly.
Episodes
Lapham’s Revolutionary America: Jill Lepore and Gordon S. Wood
“What’s extraordinary in those speeches that Lincoln gave on the eve of the war,” says Gordon S. Wood in this episode of The World in Time, “is his realization of how diverse Americahad become. We’ve got Frenchmen, we’ve got Spaniards, we’ve got Germans, we’ve got Irish, we’ve got all these different Scots, how are we going to hold together? We’re not a nation. Lincoln says, Well, we have
Lapham's Revolutionary America [Teaser]
A series from The World in Time, beginning Friday, July 3, 2026. Voices heard here: Lewis H. Lapham, Jill Lepore, Gordon S. Wood. Illustration: The 1795 flag that flew from Fort McHenry and inspired Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner.”See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Michael Pollan on Consciousness
“We have language. That’s the best tool we have for understanding the consciousness of another,” says Michael Pollan on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “You can go pretty far with it, as Proust himself showed, but that is, in the end, the function of art: to translate one consciousness into another. That’s the only way we know how to do it right now, and it’s pretty powerful, bu
Whither the Humanities? (With Zena Hitz, Justin Smith-Ruiu, and D. Graham Burnett)
“What in God’s name are the humanities,” Lewis Lapham asked in a commencement address he delivered at St. John’s College in 2003, “and why are they of any use to us here in the bright blue, technological wonder of the twenty-first century?” His answer—the humanities are not luxuries akin to “the country club membership or the house in Palm Beach” but liberating necessities—harmonizes with
Francine Prose on Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen
“Everyone expected this comet to hit and obliterate England in 1857,” says Francine Prose in this episode of The World in Time. “So a lot of the novel is about the pressure from this belief or non-belief that the comet is going to hit. And of course, Dickens, who’s sort of scientifically minded, dismisses it immediately. And Andersen, who is romantic—paranoid, fearful, the whole list of t
Mary Beard on the Classics
“Fifth-century Athens still lingers even for us, and it’s a mythical golden age,” says Mary Beard on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “And we imagine that all we can do is count ourselves lucky to be the inheritors of the Greek Miracle, all of the things that the Greeks invented: democracy, philosophy, and theater, among much else. I struggled with that when I was at university b
Yiyun Li on “The Try-Works”
“‘There is a wisdom that is woe, but there is a woe that is madness’—to me, that summarizes much of life,” says Yiyun Li on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “I don’t think many people would put those three words together in a sentence—wisdom, woe, and madness—as a sort of trinity. I mean, when I say that passage is a touchstone in my reading, I go back to this line and think abou
Adrienne Mayor on Geomyths
“The oarfish is not only extremely long—I think they can be 20 feet long—but they have a very narrow, undulating body. They’re silvery, but they have a red crest all along their back. It really looks exactly like the sea monsters in ancient Greek vase paintings,” says Adrienne Mayor on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “It looks like an oarfish guarding the Golden Fleece. They liv
Robert Moor on Trees
“The tree is this living skin wrapped around a dead core,” says Robert Moor on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “You have this skin of living wood that’s being produced by the cambium, and it’s growing outward and inward simultaneously. Like a series of matryoshka dolls, each layer is encased within the next over time, which is why trees continue thickening. And that also leads t
Philip Hoare on William Blake and “Monstrous Pictures of Whales”
“The leviathan is both positive and negative,” says Philip Hoare on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “The image is almost yin and yang: there is the behemoth, kind of a hippopotamus-elephant-rhinoceros, and the leviathan, which is a sea serpent, but has elements of a sperm whale skeleton that Blake had actually seen. So there is this struggle for good and evil. He acknowledged th
Anne Fadiman on Essays, Personal and Historical
“An 1833 review of the only book of poetry Hartley Coleridge published in his lifetime praised the verse for embodying ‘no trivial inheritance of his father's genius,’ but also observed, ‘It is an old saying that the oakling withers beneath the shadow of the oak.’ I have long been interested in what makes some oaklings thrive and others wither, because, in a minor way, I’m an oakling myse
Morgan Meis on Three Painters (Rubens, Marc, Mitchell)
“Taking something very specific—in each case, a painting: a painting by Rubens, a painting by Franz Marc, a painting by Joan Mitchell—this physical thing, it has a place and a time, and it sits in the world somewhere. But then you can spiral out from that into the bigger context that each painting sits in historically, intellectually. But it’s spiraling inward a little, isn’t it, too? Bec
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian on the Offshore World
“The term free port can mean everything from a little warehouse to a massive port with container ships coming and going every hour,” says Atossa Araxia Abrahamian on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “But, basically, a free port is an island, a cordoned-off piece of land, where the rules are not the same as outside. In economics and history, we sometimes talk about onshore and off
Episode 22: James Romm on Plato and Tyranny
“It becomes a terrible, terrible story of a war of all against all,” says James Romm on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “There are three or four different factions, each with their own military wing, competing for control of Syracuse. Plato is watching all this from Athens in what must have been a state of horror, because he understands he was partly to blame, or at least that s
Episode 21: The Friends of Attention
“The Cold War laboratory research identified something real about humans: that we can focus on a stimulus on a screen. But it is hardly an adequate account of what it is to be a human person,” says D. Graham Burnett in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “For instance, giving your mind and time and senses to the world and using your mind and time and senses to receive the world and
Encore Episode: Stacy Schiff on Samuel Adams
“I think that I started the book,” historian Stacy Schiff says of “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams,” “with this thirst for somebody who—I’ve just been writing about the Salem witch trials for many years. And I was looking for someone who had the courage of his convictions, to stand up and take an unpopular stand, which is something that takes a very long time for anyone to do in the Massa
Episode 20: Charles King on Handel's “Messiah”
“Handel gets to Dublin and he’s trying to put together musicians, he’s looking for singers and lo and behold, there is Susannah Cibber who has turned up in Dublin to try to restart her career at exactly the time that Handel is there,” says Charles King in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “Handel enlists Cibber in the cast, but she doesn’t read music. Anything she sings has to be
Episode 19: Jeremy Eichler on “Time’s Echo”
“When it comes to thinking about the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust, we’re nearing the end of the twilight of living memory,” says Jeremy Eichler in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “Pretty soon, there will be a time when not a single living soul on our planet has firsthand lived experience—felt contact with this particular world, these historical events. And our w
Episode 18: Stephen Greenblatt on Christopher Marlowe
“Marlowe is—astonishingly—inventing this; it’s not as if he can draw upon Shakespeare,” says Stephen Greenblatt in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Doctor Faustus was already written. It’s a remarkable, almost inexplicable achievement to figure out how to get inside in a play where, after all, people are standing up before 2,000 or 3,000 people and
Episode 17: Queequeg and Ishmael in Love (with Alexander Chee, Aaron Sachs, and Caleb Crain)
“There is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends,” Ishmael tells us in “A Bosom Friend,” chapter ten of Moby Dick, excerpted in the “Friendship” issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. “Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeym
Episode 16: Brenda Wineapple on the Scopes Trial
“Religion gives people certainty and it gives people solace,” says Brenda Wineapple in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “And according to
William Jennings Bryan, it gives you a moral center, too, which would make
impossible the cruelties of, say, World War One, which horrified him. But that kind of intolerable meaninglessness is something Clarence Darrow, too, feels so strongly.
Episode 15: Elizabeth Kolbert
“There’s nothing more extraordinary than the world we live in,” says Elizabeth Kolbert in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “We are extremely tied up as humans for whatever reason. We have obviously evolved to pay a lot of attention to our fellow humans. But if we look beyond that, even for an instant, we see that the world is an absolutely amazing place. We are surrounded by spec
Episode 14: Charles Baxter on “The Sermon”
“Father Mapple is in some strange, almost obscure way, a kind of negative double for Ahab,” says novelist and critic Charles Baxter in this episode of The World in Time. “Like Ahab, he is speaking from a great height. He begins his sermon by issuing orders. He tells all the congregants to sit down. And, you know, they have to listen to him. What other choice do they have? But what is impo
Episode 13: Nicholas Boggs on James Baldwin
“They were against all categories,” says Nicholas Boggs of James Baldwin and the men he loved in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “They really were outsiders, all of them. Sometimes people think, oh, well, he was just drawn to these men who were essentially straight, like he had some kind of complex or something. Maybe. But he was also just drawn to these crazy outsiders. As Yora
Episode 12: James Marcus on Emerson and Melville
“In this part of the essay, Emerson is talking about walking a lot, you know, sort of walking through nature, taking a stroll,” says James Marcus in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “He has this rather sublime experience, and he describes it in this way: ‘Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I b
Episode 11: Matthew Hollis on "The Seafarer"
“This is a sea that will take your life,” says Matthew Hollis in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “This is the cruel sea. This is the hard sea. And it takes extraordinary skill and good luck to survive it. But we come quickly to realize in this poem that actually there is a different kind of allegorical turmoil within as well. It’s one of the things that makes this poem so compel
Episode 10: "Loomings," with Francine Prose
“Well, I mean for starters it still is the greatest first sentence ever,” says Francine Prose in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “I mean, three words. A three-word first sentence. I think if you were to ask a kind of range of readers, ‘Can you think of a first sentence?’ You know, you probably get ‘It was the best of times, and the worst of times’ or ‘the worst of times, and the
Episode 9: Roger Berkowitz
“In tyranny, you may not have a whole lot of political freedom, but you can still live a pretty free life under tyranny,” says Roger Berkowitz in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “In your private world, you can live under a dictator and still read what books you want and talk to people as long as you don’t act out in the public sphere. Totalitarianism is quite different. It tries
Episode 8: Herman Melville, Extracted (with Wyatt Mason)
“There’s something I find strangely moving about the ‘Extracts’ section of Moby Dick—before we even get into the text—by virtue of the attention that has been paid to the whale,” writer Wyatt Mason says in this episode of The World in Time. “It’s astonishing as you’re reading through. It’s proof of two kinds of life. It’s proof of the life of the creature itself. But it’s also proof of th
Episode 7: Daniel Mendelsohn and Lewis H. Lapham
“In a famous episode, he says his name is Nobody, which in a way is obviously a lie,” says writer, scholar, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn in this episode of The World in Time. “But in another way is sort of true because he has become a nobody, right? And another way to describe the sort of narrative arc of The Odyssey is: he has to go from being a nobody and reclaim his identity and be
Episode 6: Justin Smith-Ruiu and Rachel Richardson
“So what is a drug?” asks scholar-essayist Justin Smith-Ruiu in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “It’s a dry good that is transported and then sold in a particular measurable unit, and until you have those units of measurement and standardization for the purposes of commercial exchange, you don’t really have drugs. Of course, you have ayahuasca and fly agaric and whatever else, a
Episode 5: Ben Tarnoff and John Jeremiah Sullivan
“I think the conflict for Twain is that he does want to be taken seriously as a writer,” says Ben Tarnoff on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “The tricky part is that he does have a deep affinity for the low culture of the frontier expressed primarily through humor and tall tales. That he connects to that at an intuitive level. He has an ear for it. But he worries that if he goes
Episode 4: Kira Brunner Don and Nathan Brown
“They would take you around, introduce you to all of their contacts, translate for you, and help you put together the story,” says scholar-journalist Kira Brunner Don in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “And I often felt like, you pay them, of course, a day rate, but there was this understanding that real news was made by American journalists who flew in and told you what was wha
Episode 3: Francine Prose
“I really loved it,” Francine Prose says of Nixon-era San Francisco in this episode of The World in Time, “but I also knew I wasn’t going to live there forever. Everyone I knew was living in these group houses in Berkeley, and then in the city itself, with ten people or fifteen people. I talk about the Reno Hotel, a former nineteenth-century hotel that had been built for boxers, and the c
Episode 2: Lewis H. Lapham, Part Two
“Lewis was always engaging with some important piece of literature from the past,” says historian and classicist Emily Allen-Hornblower in this episode of The World in Time, edited from audio recorded at the memorial service held for Lewis H. Lapham in September 2024. “You can be chatting about the insanity of the current political landscape and quickly things would shift to how history r
Episode 1: Lewis H. Lapham, Part One
“I’m an essayist, not a podcaster,” says Lapham’s Quarterly acting editor Donovan Hohn, “but then the same could be said of Lewis, who took the form and the medium of the podcast and did with it what he’d done all of his adulthood: have conversations with people whose voices he wished to hear. Seasoned listeners to The World in Time may rest assured that similar conversations will resume
Episode 102: Robert D. Kaplan
“The Greeks knew that many problems have no solution,” journalist Robert D. Kaplan says on this episode of The World in Time, about his inspiration for writing “The Tragic Mind.” “They knew that leaders and people in their daily lives often face only bad choices. And yet the world at the same time is beautiful. The Greeks could admit a beautiful world and that the world ultimately could n
Episode 101: Elizabeth Winkler
“Among Shakespeare scholars,” journalist Elizabeth Winkler writes at the beginning of “Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies,” “the Shakespeare authorship question—the theory that William Shakespeare might not have written the works published under his name—does not exist; that is, it is not permitted. As a consequence, it has become the most horrible, vexed, unspeakable subject in t
Episode 100: Jared Yates Sexton
“When you start looking at deeper, more accurate history,” writer Jared Yates Sexton says in this episode of The World in Time, “you start to realize that a lot of what we have learned through conventional history—and this is in public education, best sellers, documentaries, and television shows—a lot of the history that we have gotten is actually mythology. Take a look at the American Re
Episode 99: Ben Jealous
This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Ben Jealous, author of Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing, about Jealous’ personal history and his career, and how both inform what he makes of our current moment.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Episode 98: Edward Achorn
“I think the mood in 1860 would have a haunting familiarity to people today,” Edward Achorn says at the start of this episode of The World in Time, discussing the setting of “The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention That Changed History.” “The politics in the country seemed to have broken down. People were talking at each other. They were no longer listening to each other. Th
Episode 97: Stacy Schiff
“I think that I started the book,” historian Stacy Schiff says of “The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams,” “with this thirst for somebody who—I’ve just been writing about the Salem witch trials for many years. And I was looking for someone who had the courage of his convictions, to stand up and take an unpopular stand, which is something that takes a very long time for anyone to do in the Massa
Episode 96: Adam Hochschild
“If there was one thing that I would want people to take away from American Midnight,” Adam Hochschild says on this episode of The World in Time, “it’s the idea that democracy, despite all the different checks and balances and the separation of powers and whatnot written into our Constitution more than two hundred years ago, is fragile. It can easily be shattered and broken. It can easily
Episode 95: Andrea Wulf
“For most of my adult life, I have been trying to understand why we are who we are,” Andrea Wulf writes at the start of “Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self.” “This is the reason why I write history books. In my previous books, I have looked at the relationship between humankind and nature in order to understand why we’ve destroyed so much of our magnific
Episode 94: Kermit Roosevelt III
“We’re at a moment now,” Kermit Roosevelt III says of our national mythology on this episode of The World in Time, “where the standard story isn’t working for us anymore. And I think in part it’s not working for us because it actually teaches us bad lessons. It teaches us that violent revolution against the national government, treason against the national government, is American patrioti
Episode 93: Aaron Sachs
“These are indeed dark times,” Aaron Sachs, author of Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times, says at the start of this episode of The World in Time. “And as a historian, I’ve been wondering my whole professional life how these dark times compare to other dark times…I feel like it’s my job as a historian to to really investigate the claim that th
Episode 92: Olivier Zunz
“Tocqueville’s deepest belief,” historian Olivier Zunz writes at the beginning of “The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville,” “was that democracy is a powerful, yet demanding, political form. What makes Tocqueville’s work still relevant is that he defined democracy as an act of will on the part of every citizen—a project constantly in need of revitalization and
Episode 91: Leo Damrosch
“There have been a number of biographies of Casanova, but the time is overdue for a biography of a different kind,” writes Leo Damrosch at the start of “Adventurer: The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova.” “He was the first to tell his own story, in a massive autobiography entitled “Histoire de Ma Vie”…The word histoire can mean ‘story’ as well as ‘history,’ and a story it certainly is. P
Episode 90: Eric Jay Dolin
During the American Revolution—and in all the years since—many believed that “privateering was a sideshow in the war,” writes Eric Jay Dolin in “Rebels at Sea.” “Privateering has long been given short shrift in general histories of the conflict, where privateers are treated as a minor theme if they are mentioned at all. The coverage in maritime and naval histories of the Revolution is not
Episode 89: Richard Cohen
“When Herodotus composed his great work,” Richard Cohen writes at the start of Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past, “people named it The Histories, but scholars have pointed out that the word means more accurately ‘inquiries’ or ‘researches.’ Calling it The Histories dilutes its originality. I want to make a larger claim about those who have shaped the way we view our pas
Episode 88: Andrew S. Curran
“In 1739 the members of Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences met to determine the subject of the 1741 prize competition,” historians Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Andrew S. Curran write at the beginning of “Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race.” “As was customarily the case, the topic they chose was constructed in the form of a question: ‘What is
Episode 87: Peter S. Goodman
“Davos Man’s domination of the gains of globalization,” journalist Peter S. Goodman writes in “Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World,” “is how the United States found itself led by a patently unqualified casino developer as it grappled with a public health emergency that killed more Americans than those who died in World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War combined. Davo
Episode 86: Oliver Milman
“A world without insects would be a particularly horrifying, grim place,” environmental journalist Oliver Milman tells us on the latest episode of The World in Time, “and certainly not a place we would want to live in—and indeed it wouldn’t be a place we would be able to live in.”
This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Oliver Milman, author of “The Insect Crisis: The Fall
Episode 85: Roosevelt Montás
“In my sophomore year of high school, I came upon a remarkable book in a garbage pile next to the house where we rented an apartment in Queens,” scholar Roosevelt Montás writes at the beginning of “Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation.” “It was the second volume of the pretentiously bound Harvard Classics series, and it contained
Episode 84: Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy
“Existing biographies of Thomas Jefferson,” the historian Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy writes in The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson’s Idea of a University, treat the retired president’s singular founding of a university “as merely an epilogue, while institutional histories give little consideration to the biographical context…Beginning at the age of seventy-three—havin
Episode 83: Joseph J. Ellis
In order to understand the American Revolution, historian Joseph J. Ellis writes in The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773–1783, “we must be capable of thinking paradoxically. The American Revolution succeeded because it was not really a revolution. Which means it succeeded because it failed.”
This week on the podcast, Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Joseph J. Ellis, au
Episode 82: David Wengrow
“If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers,” David Wengrow, an archaeologist, and the late David Graeber, an anthropologist, write at the beginning of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, “what were they doing all that time? If agriculture and cities did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what did they
Episode 81: Geoffrey Wheatcroft
“About twenty years ago,” the historian Geoffrey Wheatcroft says on the latest episode of The World in Time, “Umberto Eco said he was amused by a survey in which a quarter of British schoolchildren thought that Winston Churchill was a fictional character. But in fact in a way that is what he has become. He has become something outside conventional history. This is demonstrated by his port
Episode 80: Nicholas Crane
The journey at the heart of this week’s episode of The World in Time is “the most important story of our age” for writer and explorer Nicholas Crane. “We’re in the grips now of both a Covid-19 pandemic and rapid climate change, which are putting greater demands on international science than anything that’s gone before us. And if you track back through time and ask yourself, When did inter
Episode 79: Charles Foster
For 150,000 years “humans didn’t behave much like us,” the veterinarian, philosopher, and legal scholar Charles Foster writes in Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness. “They weren’t, to use the phrase beloved and hated by archaeologists, ‘behaviorally modern.’ Probably they didn’t adorn their bodies, bury their dead with grave goods, make bladed or bone tools,
Episode 78: Michael Knox Beran
“They were, by and large, descended from the well-to-do classes of colonial and early republican America, from New England merchants and divines, from Boston Brahmins and Anglo-Dutch Patroons,” Michael Knox Beran writes of the figures at the center of WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy. “But the Civil War and its attendant changes altered their place in life, and
Episode 77: Philip Hoare
In this episode of The World in Time, Lewis H. Lapham and Philip Hoare discuss Albrecht Dürer’s brilliance, what his art meant to people throughout history, and the centuries-long ubiquity of his woodcut of a rhinoceros—an animal the artist had never seen.
Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Philip Hoare, author of “Albert and the Whale: Albrecht Dürer and How Art Imagines Our World.”
Thanks to
Episode 76: Eric Berkowitz
“The compulsion to silence others is as old as the urge to speak,” historian Eric Berkowitz writes in Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News, “because speech—words, images, expression itself—exerts power…Even in countries where free expression is cherished, we often forget that forgoing censorship requires the embrace of discord as a fai
Episode 75: Simon Winchester
Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Simon Winchester, author of “Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World.”
Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.c
Episode 74: Alan Taylor
“I think we do ourselves a disservice,” Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Alan Taylor says on the latest episode of The World in Time, speaking about his book American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783–1850, “if we romanticize the origins of United States and cast it as some sort of political utopia from which we have fallen. I think we’d do a lot better if we’d s
Episode 73: Sonia Shah
“Life is on the move, today as in the past,” journalist Sonia Shah writes in her book The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move. “For centuries, we’ve suppressed the fact of the migration instinct, demonizing it as a harbinger of terror. We’ve constructed a story about our past, our bodies, and the natural world in which migration is the anomaly. It’s an illusion
Episode 72: Louis Menand
Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Louis Menand, author of “The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War.”
Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-n
Episode 71: Nathaniel Rich
Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Nathaniel Rich, author of “Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade.”
Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-se
Episode 70: Dennis C. Rasmussen
Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Dennis C. Rasmussen author of “Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders.”
Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https:
Episode 69: Richard Thompson Ford
Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Richard Thompson Ford, author of “Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History.”
Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/p
Episode 68: Lance Morrow
Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Lance Morrow, author of “God and Mammon: Chronicles of American Money.”
Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-s
Episode 67: David S. Brown
Lewis H. Lapham speaks with David S. Brown, author of “The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams.”
Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Priva
Episode 66: Michael J. Sandel
Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Michael J. Sandel, author of “The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good.”
Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/
Episode 65: George Dyson
Lewis H. Lapham speaks with George Dyson, author of Analogia: The Emergence of Technology Beyond Programmable Control. Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.co
Episode 64: Harold Holzer
“No American president has ever counted himself fully satisfied with his press coverage,” the historian Harold Holzer writes in the introduction of “The Presidents vs. the Press.” “Their belief that they are better than their bad press, and that they bear a nearly sacred obligation to counter or control criticism, has remained fixed since the age of bewigged chief executives and hand-scre
Episode 63: Jacob Goldstein
Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Jacob Goldstein, author of “Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing.”
Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-s
Episode 62: Edward D. Melillo
“In November 1944,” Edward D. Melillo writes in his book The Butterfly Effect, “Decca Records released a single featuring Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots. ‘Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall’ skyrocketed to number one on the top of the Billboard charts in the United States and inaugurated a long-term collaboration between the ‘First Lady of Song’ and the fabled record producer Milt Gab
Episode 61: Derek W. Black
Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Derek W. Black, author of “Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy.”
Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at
Episode 60: Richard Kreitner
“Disunion—the possibility that it all might go to pieces—is a hidden thread through our entire history,” the journalist and historian Richard Kreitner writes in Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union. “Our refusal to recognize this, like patients who insist, against all evidence, that they are not ill, has been a major cause of our political
Episode 59: Thomas Frank
Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Thomas Frank, author of “The People, No.”
Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
